Memories are not linear; they have a chronology all their own. In Winter Journal, Paul Auster looks back at his life, meandering back and forth in time. He is the 63-year-old man climbing out of bed to look at the snow turning the trees white, the boy, all of 3 and a half years old, going wild in the endless space of a department store and splitting his cheek on a nail on the leg of a carpenter’s bench, and a 12-year-old focused on his game of baseball. Each incident is captured with the clarity of film and a clear memory of what it felt to be that person at that time.

This is a journey through Auster’s life: the places he lived, the women he loved, and the scars he picked up along the way. He writes about the body, the way it grows, develops and starts to wear out. He writes entirely in second person, which can be hard to get right, but it works here.

Marriages in his family seem to be rocky, except for his own. His parents’ marriage was doomed to failure: “an impetuous marriage between two incompatible souls that ran out of steam before the honeymoon was over”. Like that of his grandparents: “Your father would be such a wonderful man—if only he were different”, says his grandmother to her daughter. His father’s parents weren’t much happier: his grandmother shot her husband in their kitchen. Auster’s mother was a free spirit who went her own way, although she was a good mother to him: “you were the beneficiary of her unhappiness, and you were well loved”.

There is a lot about this book I liked: the writing and the stories he tells. However, I found parts of it a little self-indulgent: we don’t really need the details of all the places he’s lived in. It’s a device he uses to trace the path of his life but it could have been shortened considerably without losing anything. And do we really need almost the entire plot of DOA, the 1949 film by Rudolph Maté? If there was a reason for its inclusion, then I completely missed it.

But Auster at his best is a pleasure to read. Here is a vivid description of him as a 6-year-old, stepping on a nest of wasps: “seconds later you were engulfed by those stinging creatures, who were attacking your face and arms, and even as you tried to swat them away, others had crawled inside your clothes and were stabbing you in your legs and chest and back. Horrific pain. You went running out of the bushes into the grass in the backyard, no doubt screaming your head off, and there was your mother, who took one glance at you and immediately began stripping off your clothes, and when there was no longer a stitch on you, she swooped up your naked body in her arms…carried you upstairs, turned on the water, and put you in a cold, cold bath.”

You can feel the relief of the “cold, cold bath” at the end of that paragraph. It is writing like this that makes this book worth reading.

“You put two things together that have not been put together before. And the world is changed.”

This book is about coming together and moving apart, of soaring to the sky and slipping into the underworld. It begins with balloonists in the late 19th century, then moves on to a love affair between two of the balloonists before leading to the heart of the book: the death of the author’s wife.

Ballooning was dangerous but liberating, a way of breaking free from constraints, both physical and social. It was, however, a freedom that was subservient to the weather, to the direction and force of the wind, and could easily end in disaster. You could be floating in the sky one moment and flung down to earth the next, knee-deep in a rose bed.

The title of the first chapter, The Sin of Height, has echoes of Icarus, the man who flew too close to the sun which melted the wax on his wings. As the book begins, in Britain and France in the mid- to late 1800s, people are taking to the skies in hot air balloons. The author focuses on three of these balloonists: Colonel Fred Burnaby of the Royal Horse Guards in Britain, and the actress Sarah Bernhardt and photographer Félix Tournachon, better known as Nadar, in France.

All the characters in this book are real. Nadar, one of the early portrait photographers, also combines photography and aeronautics. Unlike his contemporaries, he is more interested in “the vertical” than the horizontal. Even his portraits attempt to plumb the psychological depths of his sitters, which is what makes them so memorable. But images can be formed in other, more ephemeral, ways: such as when Burnaby and his companions in their hot air balloon notice that the sun is projecting their shadows onto a cloud, like a “colossal photograph”.

We come down to earth in the second chapter, On the Level, which is about the affair between Sarah Bernhardt and Fred Burnaby. Bernhardt has conquered the stage in spite of being too small, too pale and too thin (she claims to be able to “slip between raindrops without getting wet”). She is Jewish in an anti-Semitic country and also a bohemian, which appals the puritans. Burnaby is a well-travelled man with no time for conventions. The affair between these two misfits in their worlds feels inevitable and natural—until it ends when Bernhardt moves on to another lover. Burnaby is heartbroken but cannot be angry with her. After all, she had always been honest with him: “on the level”. He eventually marries someone else but never gets over losing Sarah Bernhardt.

This takes us to the third chapter, The Loss of Depth, which is the crux of the book. We are now in the subterranean depths of grief: the loss of love, but in a more final and devastating way. After 30 years of being happily married, Barnes’s wife dies. And this is what the book has been leading up to—the unbearable pain at the loss of a loved one. This chapter is hard to read at times because it is so close to the bone, especially if you have been through the death of someone dear to you.

When I started this book, I wasn’t sure how the author was going to lead up to his wife’s death. But it all fits together. The images of height and depth run through the book: “Life’s sonar is broken and you can no longer tell how deep the seabed lies.” Plummeting several hundred feet when a balloon collapses is not so different from the shock of losing a loved one. (I’m sorry, Julian Barnes, I know you hate the use of the word loss to describe death.)

This gem of a book is an elegant and beautiful tribute to Barnes’s wife, Pat Kavanagh. I’d like to end with a line from the last chapter. Barnes goes back to the image of the three balloonists created by the sun: “And so it is with our life: so clear, so sure, until, for one reason or another—the balloon moves, the cloud disperses, the sun changes angle—the image is lost forever, available only to memory, turned into anecdote.”